TL;DR Hyperscalers use hidden egress fees (up to $0.09/GB) to create vendor lock-in, resulting in surprise bills for 95% of organizations. For MSPs, these unpredictable data retrieval costs directly compress profit margins and complicate compliance auditing. ThinkOn eliminates this risk by offering completely transparent cloud pricing with zero ingress, egress, or transactional fees.
Cloud bills exceed forecasts for 95% of organizations every year. This isn’t because data volumes grow faster than planned, but because of hidden fees most customers were never clearly provided (Flexera 2026 State of the Cloud Report). Understanding cloud pricing means looking past the storage rate to the charges that actually drive the bill — the cost of accessing and moving your data.
Hyperscale cloud providers charge significant fees every time data leaves their network. Every backup restore, disaster recovery (DR) test, and workload migration becomes a billable event at rates that never appeared on the original proposal.
The structure is deliberate. Egress fees create financial friction around data retrieval and provider switching. Once a customer’s data is inside a hyperscaler’s network, moving it is expensive—regardless of the reason. Restoring a backup costs money. Migrating to a competitor costs money. Running a compliance audit that pulls data costs money. The pricing model is designed to make staying cheaper than leaving, at every scale.
ThinkOn charges no ingress, no egress, and no transactional fees—on any plan, at any data volume. Ever. Every fee type, what hyperscalers charge, and what transparent cloud pricing looks like in practice are defined below.
Cloud pricing terms every MSP should know
| Term | Definition |
| Egress fee | A per-gigabyte charge applied when data leaves a cloud provider’s network. |
| Ingress fee | A charge applied when data enters a cloud provider’s network. Less common than egress fees but charged by some providers on large imports. ThinkOn charges neither. |
| Transactional fee | A per-operation charge for actions such as reading, writing, listing, or deleting data. Billed per thousand API calls. Accumulates rapidly in automated backup environments. |
| Transparent cloud pricing | A billing model where all charges are defined upfront, match the contracted amount, and can be explained line-by-line without specialist knowledge. No hidden thresholds. |
| Data repatriation | The process of moving data out of a cloud provider back to on-premises infrastructure or a different provider. High egress fees are the primary mechanism that makes repatriation financially prohibitive — also called cloud vendor lock-in. |
| Cloud vendor lock-in | A commercial situation where switching costs — primarily egress fees — make it economically impractical to move data to a competing provider, even when the current provider’s service or pricing is unsatisfactory. |
What are cloud egress fees and why do cloud providers charge them?
Cloud egress fees are per-gigabyte charges applied when data leaves a cloud provider’s network — charged by hyperscalers to make data retrieval and switching costly.
Egress fees are not a technical necessity, they are a commercial decision. Network bandwidth has a cost, but the per-GB rates charged by major hyperscalers bear no relationship to the actual cost of transmission. They exist primarily to create financial friction around data repatriation and provider switching. A customer with 50TB of active data who performs weekly restores can accumulate thousands of dollars per month in egress charges that were never discussed during the initial contract negotiation. Providers like ThinkOn have built competing business models by eliminating these fees entirely.
How do egress charges impact cloud service costs?
Egress fees charge per gigabyte moved out of a cloud — turning active data into an unpredictable, compounding tax on your bill.
Beyond the direct cost impact, egress charges can also limit scalability and flexibility. As organizations move larger volumes of data between cloud providers, regions, or end users, these fees can grow rapidly and become difficult to predict. This often discourages data mobility, complicates multi-cloud strategies, and increases the total cost of ownership. By understanding and planning for egress costs, businesses can make more informed infrastructure decisions, optimize data transfer patterns, and avoid unexpected expenses that erode the financial benefits of cloud adoption.
How much do cloud egress fees cost — and what is the true monthly impact on MSPs?
Some hyperscale providers charge $0.09/GB for standard egress. For a customer with 50TB of active data performing regular restores, that is $4,000–$5,000 per month in egress charges alone.
The Flexera 2026 State of the Cloud Report found that 95% of organizations experienced surprise cloud storage charges in the past year, with cloud bills exceeding forecasts by 30–40% on average.[1] The driver is not storage volume growth — it is data access charges: egress fees, transactional fees, and geographic transfer costs that compound month-over-month.
For MSPs, this creates a compounding margin problem. If the MSP absorbs the cloud cost and resells at a fixed margin, surprise egress fees compress that margin directly. If the customer bears the cost, the MSP spends unpaid hours explaining, disputing, and managing billing inquiries — time that is not billable and erodes the relationship. Either way, the MSP loses.
How do unpredictable cloud fees affect compliance obligations and budget forecasting?
Unpredictable billing complicates SOC 2, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS audit trails, and can indicate ungoverned data movement — a compliance risk distinct from the financial cost.
Billing consistency is not only a finance problem. For organizations operating under compliance frameworks, unpredictable cloud costs create governance exposure:
- SOC 2 Type II — Audit trails for cloud spending are a component of information security management. Variable, unexplained billing makes it harder to maintain clean audit records and demonstrate spending controls to auditors. ThinkOn holds SOC 2 Type II certification.
- ISO 27001 — Effective information security risk management requires that organizations understand and predict their technology costs. Surprise egress fees represent unmanaged financial risk. ThinkOn is ISO 27001 certified.
- PCI DSS — Organizations processing cardholder data need clear boundaries around their cardholder data environment. Unexpected data transfer charges can signal ungoverned data movement outside of those boundaries.
- PIPEDA (Canadian Privacy Law) — Canadian organizations handling personal information must be intentional about where and at what cost their data moves. ThinkOn’s Canadian data residency and transparent cloud pricing directly supports PIPEDA compliance obligations.
ThinkOn is not subject to any foreign data access or privacy regulations outside of Canada. Only Canadian laws apply to the data we host within Canadian borders. This ensures complete sovereignty and protection for your information.
When pricing is transparent and fixed, compliance teams can plan cloud budgets with the same precision they apply to other auditable cost centres — no footnotes required.
How do you evaluate a cloud provider’s cloud pricing model before signing a contract?
Ask seven specific questions before committing: egress fee commitment in writing, support included at no extra cost, explainable line-item billing, no minimum commitments, data residency options, independent compliance certifications, and pricing stability guarantees.
Not all transparent pricing claims are equal. These are the questions every MSP should ask:
- Does the provider commit to zero egress fees explicitly — in writing, in the contract — or is the commitment qualified by usage tiers or time periods?
- Are support services (Tier 1, 2, 3) included in the base price, or billed separately every time a customer raises a ticket?
- Is the billing granular enough that you can explain any line item to your customer without specialist knowledge or a billing specialist on the phone?
- Are there minimum commitments, reserved instance requirements, or term lock-ins that create an exit barrier if the relationship sours?
- Does the provider offer confirmed data residency in the jurisdictions your customers require for compliance purposes?
- What compliance certifications does the provider hold, and are they independently audited on a defined schedule?
- Will the provider guarantee pricing stability contractually, or can rates be changed with limited notice?
Frequently asked questions about cloud egress fees
Answers to the most common questions MSPs and IT teams have about egress fees, provider comparisons, and what zero-egress pricing means in practice.
What is the difference between ingress and egress in cloud storage?
Ingress is data moving into a cloud provider’s network (uploading). Egress is data moving out (downloading or transferring out). Most providers charge for egress but not ingress — once your data is in their cloud, they charge a premium to retrieve it. ThinkOn charges neither.
Which cloud providers charge no egress fees?
As of June 2026, providers that publicly commit to zero egress fees include ThinkOn, Wasabi, and Cloudflare R2. Among these, ThinkOn additionally offers a full-service MSP/partner program, 24/7 Tier 1–3 support included in the base price, and data residency across Canada, the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom.
Why do hyperscalers charge egress fees?
Egress fees are primarily a commercial lock-in mechanism. Once significant data volume is stored in a hyperscale cloud, high egress rates make it financially prohibitive to retrieve that data, migrate to a competitor, or repatriate it on-premises. The actual cost of bandwidth transmission does not justify the per-GB rates charged.
How do I calculate my monthly cloud egress cost?
Multiply total gigabytes transferred out of your cloud environment each month (backup restores, application data retrieval, inter-region transfers) by your provider’s per-GB egress rate.
How do cloud egress fees affect MSP margins?
Two ways. First, if the MSP absorbs the cloud cost and resells at fixed margin, surprise egress fees compress that margin directly. Second, if the customer bears the cost, the MSP spends unpaid time explaining and disputing the bill — eroding trust and consuming hours that should be spent on growth.
What compliance frameworks require predictable cloud billing?
No framework explicitly mandates zero egress fees, but SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and PIPEDA all require organizations to maintain governance over their technology costs and data movement. Unpredictable billing related to data transfer can complicate audit trails and indicate uncontrolled data flows outside of governed environments.
Can I negotiate egress fees with hyperscalers?
Enterprise customers with large committed spend can negotiate reduced egress rates or waived fees through enterprise agreements. However, these negotiations typically require six-figure annual commitments and are not available to mid-market customers or MSPs reselling on behalf of smaller clients. ThinkOn’s zero-egress commitment requires no negotiation — it applies on every plan from day one.
What does ‘data repatriation’ mean and why is it expensive?
Data repatriation is the process of moving data back from a cloud provider to on-premises infrastructure or a different provider. It is expensive primarily because of egress fees — the provider charges per gigabyte for every byte you move out.
Ready to eliminate egress fees from your cloud practice? ThinkOn is a channel-first cloud provider built for MSPs, VARs, and resellers. No ingress fees. No egress fees. No transactional fees. 24/7 Tier 1–3 support included. SOC 2, ISO 27001, and PCI DSS certified.
Download our No Egress guide to learn how eliminating egress fees can reduce cloud costs, simplify budgeting, and give your customers greater flexibility with their data.